Happy 2010! And Goals.

I almost typed “And Resolutions”, but I’m really not fond of resolutions.  Mostly because I usually fall off the wagon with them after a month or two.  But goals I like.  Why?  Well I like having an idea of what I’m aiming for.  And I feel like goals can be revised if life changes.  Life did a lot of that last year.  So what am I aiming for in 2010?

I want to continue my goal to get fit and healthy!

  • On a broad scale, I want to lose 19 pounds and return to my wedding weight from 7 years ago.  On the shorter term, I am taking part in the Ten in 10 challenge offered up by The Recipe Girl, and my goal for that is to make it into the next 10s in 1o weeks.  That is, for anyone who cares, a whole ten pounds.  Yeah, it’s ambitious, but I always do my best in the first quarter of the year (lost 12 pounds in that span last year and spent the rest of the year yo-yoing between my low–a loss of 16 pounds–and my final 13) when guilt from holiday excesses is still fresh.  By damn, I’m going to fit in my favorite jeans again!
  • While I was better about exercising regularly in 2009, I want to continue my lifestyle change.  A healthy body leads to a healthy mind (which makes it easier to write).  I already bought myself Wii Fit Plus in November, and with Christmas money, I purchased EA Sports Active: More Exercises, both of which I love.  The latter is a serious workout!  I tested it out yesterday, burning over 200 calories in half an hour!  I’m still feeling it.  Note to self: must remember to stretch calves.  EA Sports has a 6 week challenge that I want to try out.  It’s designed for 4 days a week, so I’d like to do that and supplement with the easier Wii Fit Plus exercises on the other 3 days.  Additionally, I want to return to strength training.  I did it regularly for years, such that I had a much higher muscle mass than most women my size (no one’s ever able to accurately guess my weight from looking at me), but I haven’t done that since grad school.  We have this big home gym that we can finally get to after cleaning hubby’s office, so I’d like to make friends with it again.  I’d also like to get back into walking with hubby, as he needs it for his health, and the dogs just love it, which makes for happier pooches.
  • In conjunction with my diet and fitness goals, I recognize the value of keeping record of stuff.  In 2009 I used my-calorie-counter.com to track things, but since I’ll be largely doing exercises that most sites don’t recognize (Wii Fit and EA Sports), I needed one that would allow me to manually enter calories burned.  SparkPeople does that. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday moving all my custom foods (my personal recipe nutrition info) over there and customizing my profile.  If you’re on SparkPeople and you’d like to buddy me, my SparkPage is here.  They even have an iPhone ap to keep track of stuff remotely. I don’t have an iPhone yet, but I expect to succumb this year.

I want to take more steps toward my dream of becoming a professional writer!

  • First on this list of goals is to finish the novella I started in 2009, tentatively titled Beyond Shadow and Flame.  As I said in a previous post, I plan to self-publish this to use as a marketing tool to build a readership.  I’m 2/3rds finished, and hope to have a polished product by summer (that would include finishing first draft, first round revisions, beta reads, final revisions, formatting and layout…).
  • Second on this list is to write the second draft of Hunted in Shadow.  I could call it revisions, but I’m going to be honest.  The first draft that I wrote in 2009 had some significant problems (i.e. lack of heroine’s character arc) that are going to necessitate a full rewrite.  But I know her better this go round, so I feel like this will go smoother than the first draft did.  I’d like to have this fully polished and ready to submit in 2011.
  • Third, I’d like to plot out (and possibly write, depending on how long number 2 takes) a second novella.
  • Fourth, I’d like to develop another online class to teach for the 4 year university I work for and potentially overhaul my general psych class for another community college.  Yes, it means more work, but the more I expand my online teaching opportunities, the more likely I will be to be able to do this full time, which would integrate so well with my desire to write.  Plus, with the economy in the toilet, the extra income will be a boon.
  • Fifth, on a craft front, I want to read John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, which I got in a BookWish from PBW last year and never got around to reading.
  • Sixth, lets talk about productivity.  I don’t know how many words I wrote in 2009.  I could probably dig through old posts on Mission:Accountability and get a rough approximation, but that wouldn’t take into account the difference between words actually written and net words kept.  I tend to lose a lot in fixing stuff.  I tried to find a word count spreadsheet that did what I wanted and tracked wordcounts across months, etc. but didn’t have any luck.  So I built my own.  I’d love to have pretty charts and to calculate some stuff based on specific projects and such, but my Excel Fu is not THAT good.  Still, I figure others might find an annual word count tracking spreadsheet handy, so I’m putting it out there for public consumption!   Feel free to download and share (though if you share, I’d appreciate a nod and a link back here to my blog, thanks!).

That’s it.  I’m not making any sweeping resolutions about daily word count or productivity because that changes over the course of the year depending on what’s going on in my life.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go see to the exercise portion of our program.

4 thoughts on “Happy 2010! And Goals.

  1. Woah, woah, woah. You are not calling the Wii fit “easier” than the wii sport. I have played both. True, I am more active with sport, crashing around the living room vainly trying to reach the ball I see on the screen, but the Wii fit makes me break a sweat practically from standing still. >.< And supposedly, I am fit. Being within my BMI and working out at the gym regularly.

    1. I definitely sweat more with Sport. But that is entirely related to what I do on it, I’m sure. The boxing and sparring is my favorite, and I find the one on Sport to be more of a challenge than the one on Fit. I outstripped the expert level to a perfect score on Fit in a month. I like having the combination of both though. I’ve got a nice yoga/strength training routine built on Fit that Sport just doesn’t do.

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